F
Frank J. Lhota
Recently, I had a virus scare. A DLL that was somehow used by explorer was
infected. Norton prevented the DLL from running, but I had to put up with a
constant stream of pop-ups as NAV would intervene to prevent it from
running. I finally solved the problem by booting from a floppy, so that I
came up in DOS mode. I then renamed the offending DLL and rebooted. This
solved the problem! Windows XP came up OK, and Norton Antivirus had no
problem zapping the offending DLL.
Later, it occurred to me that this approach worked only because my primary
partition is FAT32. If it was a NTFS partition, then I would not be able to
do anything with it from a DOS boot. Most likely, NTFS would not fit on a
floppy, but this made me wonder if a DOS-like operating system with NTFS
support could be written to a bootable floppy. That would be a quite useful
diagnostic tool, and could be used for making repairs such as I just did.
Does anyone know if there is a CD-bootable, CLI operating system that
supports NTFS, and if so, where can I get it?
infected. Norton prevented the DLL from running, but I had to put up with a
constant stream of pop-ups as NAV would intervene to prevent it from
running. I finally solved the problem by booting from a floppy, so that I
came up in DOS mode. I then renamed the offending DLL and rebooted. This
solved the problem! Windows XP came up OK, and Norton Antivirus had no
problem zapping the offending DLL.
Later, it occurred to me that this approach worked only because my primary
partition is FAT32. If it was a NTFS partition, then I would not be able to
do anything with it from a DOS boot. Most likely, NTFS would not fit on a
floppy, but this made me wonder if a DOS-like operating system with NTFS
support could be written to a bootable floppy. That would be a quite useful
diagnostic tool, and could be used for making repairs such as I just did.
Does anyone know if there is a CD-bootable, CLI operating system that
supports NTFS, and if so, where can I get it?